The health care community has recognized in recent years the importance of preventive care in managing patients' health. Preventive care is important for managing the health of patients having chronic diseases or long-term conditions, as well as for reducing the incidence of undesirable behavior (e.g. smoking) in at-risk patients. Preventive care includes educating patients about diseases and/or health consequences of behavior, ensuring communication between patients and health care providers (e.g. doctors), and providing patients with tools and/or treatments for managing diseases or behaviors.
Commonly used preventive care approaches suffer from several drawbacks. Much of preventive care is voluntary, and thus a large fraction of preventive care resources is typically spent on patients who actively seek involvement in their care. A large number of patients do not actively seek information and treatment in the absence of symptoms. Also, health care providers receive very little information on whether patients are complying with preventive care guidelines. Thus, health care providers often are not able to take remedial steps before the disease affects patients symptomatically (e.g. through pain). Reaching passive patients and people at risk for developing medical conditions is critical to delivering effective preventive care.
The mass-marketing techniques used for health education by most health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and insurance companies allow little customization of information to an individual patient's needs. Consequently, many patients may not directly identify with the educational approaches used by their health care providers. Personalizing health education would significantly raise the effectiveness of preventive health care, especially in children and adolescents.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,542,420, Goldman et al. describe a system for prescribing personalized diets to individual patients. Health profiles of the patients are used to generate the personalized diets. The system described by Goldman et al. requires patient initiative in the prescription process.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,140,419, Galumbeck et al. describe a multiply-hierarchical data delivery system capable of addressing receivers singly or in groups. The Galumbeck et al. patent does not discuss health education issues. Other U.S. Patent Nos. related to selective addressing of receivers include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,565,909 and 5,432,542 by Thibadeau et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,924 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,925 by Freeman et al.
None of the above-mentioned disclosures provides a system or method capable of delivering personalized health information to a patient, without requiring an express request for the information by the patient.